


Some Time We Can't Erase

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 22:01:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13397145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree





	Some Time We Can't Erase

She can’t sleep with the door closed. Doesn’t like blankets, even; hardly can stand to have the sheet on her, even on cold nights in the lab, for fear she’ll wake up in the night and have it twisted around her legs and not know what it is at first. She throws the clothes she was wearing that day into the trash chute. Twice a day, she showers, scrubbing at her skin to the point of rawness, swearing she can still see dirt, still feeling filthy regardless. She brushes her hair until her scalp protests, brushes her teeth until she spits blood and has to stop. Nothing about her feels as though it belongs to her alone. She doesn’t look in the mirror much because she something about her doesn’t look right anymore.

Caitlin, patient, maternal Caitlin, who’d help if Jesse would only say the word, buys clothes out of her own salary and brings them to the labs. Loose things, comfortable things, things that don’t feel like a hand constricting on her skin. Jesse resents her own naked vulnerability, but she says thank you anyway and gives Caitlin the smallest of smiles when she shows up in the cortex. She misses the lab staff from her earth and the bright bustle of a S.T.A.R. Labs not brought to ruin, but there’s no sense in dwelling on it now.

After all, to them she’s been dead for months. Everyone on Earth-2 would have given her up as gone forever the day Zoom had taken her. She wonders what approach the papers had taken: hand-wringing? Quiet reverence? She is, after all, a Wells, with all the cachet that conveys. Her father’s assistant, Beth, had always cataloged the news items they were in. Jesse wonders what they said in her obituary, if it had hurt Beth to neatly cut out the column. She’d been there as long as the labs had, had watched Jesse grow up, and now, she supposes, has watched her die.

She feels an emptiness for the small things. There were books she had been reading that she’ll never finish now. Classes she’ll never complete. Movies she had planned to see with friends will forever go unwatched. The basil plant on the kitchen windowsill will wither and die now. The food in the refrigerator will spoil. The mail will pile up, or maybe they’ll just begin stamping it undeliverable. _Return to sender: deceased._ Jesse imagines someone tromping through the house and putting all of their possessions into garbage bags, erasing any trace of their having been there at all.

Jesse Quick, that golden, shining light. Her father’s North Star, pointing the way. She had always been the strong one, always independent, always chafing against her father’s caution. All the love he had poured into her mother he had taken and poured into her, back when it had just become the two of them. Jesse had been the tether holding him to the earth, the tiny, angry wall standing between her father and the grief that had threatened to swallow them both whole. She’d shouted and spat and scratched at Zoom as best she could, fighting him with the same energy she’d once thought was inexhaustible, until even that final flame had been extinguished.

She hates this lab. All the dull colorless walls and all the disused rooms, everything bleached of life. It’s too dangerous to leave, but too stifling to stay. All of her attempts to make their antiseptic quarters into something worth living in can’t paper over the hopelessness that gnaws at her. They live like transients, nothing but the essentials, dependent on the kindness of those around them. Jesse feels like some strange deity being offered sacrifices of creature comforts: from Barry, a sampling of chocolate bars that don’t exist on Earth-2; from Cisco, an endless supply of movies to occupy her brain and her hours. They’re all busy with the metas, cutting a swath through them to get to Zoom, and these are their apologies.

Sometimes she sneaks out of their room in bare feet, socks and tennis shoes in hand, careful not to make a sound and wake her father. There’s a treadmill they’d once used to test Barry’s speed, now fallen out of use like everything else here. No one notices that she’s changed the settings for herself, escalating the difficulty with every passing run. She stops only when her legs are too jellied to support her any longer, sits on the floor and feels the sweat still run rivers down her back and the stitch in her side throb with agony. She’ll get up when she can, start the process over. She’ll run, and run, and run, to see if she can escape it.


End file.
